Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer Movie Review:


Broomfield's 1992 documentary Aileen: The Selling of a Serial Killer was so controversial that he was called to give evidence at Aileen Wournos' appeal. So he decided to make a follow-up. The earlier film focussed on how the people involved in Wuornos' arrest and trial (from friends and family to the arresting officers) profited through selling her story to the media. It painted Wuornos as a victim of society.

And it's intriguing to watch Broomfield revisit this outspoken, contradictory character a decade later. After a startling appeals hearing and interview in which it becomes clear that Wuornos is trying to speed her execution, not avoid it, Broomfield digs into her past and finds a woman who has indeed been abused and marginalized since birth. So it's hardly surprising that she's the paranoid, mad, untrustworthy figure we see now.

The film is punctuated with key conversations with Wuornos from the appeal hearing to the day before her execution--each sets a different tone, and each features a moment when we witness her tipping over into raving lunacy. But underneath the wide-eyed ranting, a truth emerges that even Broomfield's slightly heavy-handed filming style can't water down. Wuornos wasn't innocent, but she also wasn't a serial killer by any definition; whether the seven killings were in self-defence, cold-blooded murder or a combination of the two is irrelevant. This is a woman who never had a chance in life. It's never suggested that she should have been released, but no one ever bothered to properly look into the irregularities in her case ... or in her personality.

And since this was a capital case that bull-headed charge to execution is extremely disturbing. As usual, Broomfield centres the film on his own quest for the truth, and he never quite gets to the bottom of Wuornos' stories. But with his filmmaking partner Churchill, he does manage to create a scarily revealing look at the whole capital punishment industry, which has never been shown to deter crime (on the contrary!).

This is a chilling, extremely insightful documentary--not so much for what it tells us about Aileen Wuornos as for what it says about our society. It also sets up Patty Jenkins' upcoming dramatic feature Monster (with Charlize Theron as Wuornos) for much deeper scrutiny. And rightly so.

Rich Cline

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